This document is Todd Julie's paper for their POL101 class responding to the prompt of whether they agree or disagree with Winston Churchill's statement that "democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." Over three paragraphs, Julie argues that capitalism, not democracy, is the true guiding principle of modern society. China provides an example of a large, non-democratic state that has found success through state-controlled capitalism. While democracy may be preferable to irrational dictatorships, China questions whether democracy is necessary for economic prosperity. Churchill's statement is therefore not entirely clear, as alternatives like China's system appear to effectively direct capitalism for citizens' benefit without democracy.

1. Divorced From Democracy: A Critical Examination Of
Democracy & It’s Possible Alternatives
By
Todd Julie
For
Professors Joseph Wong & Jeffrey Kopstein
POL101
T.A. Alena Drieschova
Nov.14, 2011
1

2. Paper question:
Winston Churchill once remarked: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of
government except all the others that have been tried.” Do you agree or disagree with this
statement? Construct an argument by materials from the readings and lectures in your essay.
2

3. Winston Churchill's statement is more difficult to assess than it first appears. To do so,
we must keep three important considerations in mind: Firstly, we must be careful to
differentiate between democracy and capitalism. These two are often confused and the
former given an automatic share in the accomplishments of the latter. Secondly, we must
decide on the separate strengths and weaknesses of each and their relative importance to
modern society. Thirdly, should we determine capitalism to be the more important
system, we must ask ourselves whether or not there is another political system, more
suited to extract the maximum value from capitalism.
In this paper I will assert that capitalism is, by far, the dominant partner in a long,
historical marriage of convenience with democracy. Thus joined, capitalism's
accomplishments could happily be deposited in a joint bank account without too much
squabbling over fair portions of credit. I will also assert that it is the material comforts
that have come with capitalism that societies truly value. However, unrestrained
capitalism is not without its darker side and the wealth we so value, is endangered by
democracy’s failure to provide a strong counterpoint to capitalism’s more inequitable
excesses. Through out the twentieth century, democracy could still be viewed as the
lesser evil, in comparison to Nazism or Soviet communism. With the appearance of
twenty-first century China – an autocracy practicing a more secure form of state–
controlled capitalism and meeting with more success than any of the western
democracies, it may be time for a divorce of capitalism from its former partner.
3

4. Benjamin Constant grasped this potential flaw in modern democracy; that men would
give up their political freedom – the guarantee of their prized civil freedoms – to
recklessly pursue their own happiness (Constant, p.12). To a great extent, this is what has
happened. More recent studies by Alexander Todorov have shown gut reactions to a
political candidate's face to be accurate in predicting the outcome of elections almost 70
per cent of the time (Todorov, p.1623). Combined with findings by Leonard
Wantchekon, that more generalized political slogans work better for challengers in an
election, while more specific promises work better for incumbents (Wantchekon, p.417),
we get a picture of democracy as a system of widespread irrationality. Yet the system
continues to function better than all of its historical alternatives. One way to reconcile
these facts is to conclude that democracy is not the real guiding principal of our modern
society. Drawing attention to the differences between ancient and modern liberty,
Constant pointed out that moderns attach a great deal more importance to individual
freedoms and civil society than to political rights.
Today, democracy faces a "collective action problem" (Olson) of truly global
proportions. Olson defines the collective action problem this way: "Though all of the
members of a group therefore have a common interest in obtaining the collective benefit,
they have no common interest in paying the cost of that collective benefit" (Olson, p.21).
He also goes on to draw a distinction between large and small groups, in reference to this
problem. Members of smaller groups will stand a greater chance of obtaining a greater
share of the collective good. As he says, "The larger the group, the farther it will fall
short of providing an optimal amount of a collective good" (Olson, p.35). Referring these
4

5. ideas back to Constant, we might say the small ancient city-states of Greece faced a much
smaller collective action problem and so, could afford more direct political freedoms.
The much larger nation-state faced a larger collective action problem and curtailed
political rights accordingly. Interestingly enough, while increasing size may be bad for
democracy, it's great for capitalism because it provides a larger common market.
Modern democracy exists as the plaything of free market capitalism. The power of
interference in the affairs of individuals (characteristic of ancient democracies) (Constant,
p.11) is stripped from modern democracy, not to provide men with individual liberty but
to turn around and give this right of interference to commerce. Marx’s criticism that
bourgeois notions of “freedom, culture, law, . . . are but the outgrowth of the conditions
of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property” (Marx, p.24), is no less true today
than when he wrote it. It is interesting to think about Constant's comparison of ancient
and modern liberty, in the light of Marx's critique of capitalism. Constant says, "The
abolition of slavery has deprived the free population of all the leisure they used to have
when slaves did most of the work" (Constant, p.4). He puts fourth that moderns don't
own slaves and so, don't have as much time to devote to the exercise of political decision
making (Constant, p.5). Marx points out, the capitalist class have an entire underclass of
working poor who they exploit as no other group of men in history have been exploited
(Marx, P.20). One does not have to agree with the feasibility of Marx’s communist
revolution to see the rightness of his critique of unfettered capitalism.
5

6. In the twentieth century it was easy to attribute western successes to a combination of
democracy and capitalism and not think too deeply about which element was really the
deciding factor. Confronted by two possible alternatives: fascism and Soviet
communism, the west emerged triumphant. Fascism was defeated militarily during
WWII and in the case of Nazism, can be dismissed on purely moral grounds. Soviet
communism survived the war. While moral claims can be made against Stalin, his
prediction that the Soviet Union had to do for it's economy in 10 years what other
countries do in 50 or be buried by them (Kopstein, Lecture Oct.17) and the imperatives
such a statement presented makes this a slightly less clear-cut case. Especially given the
almost successful Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union a few years after Stalin made this
prediction (Kopstein, Lecture Oct.17). However, in subsequent decades running up to
1989, the Soviet Union's economy stagnated and was far outstripped by the America's
capitalist democracy (Kopstein, Lecture Oct.17). Democratic capitalism was a more
efficient system than Soviet communism.
In the twenty-first century, we have an example in China of a large non-democratic,
capitalist economy that appears to be outshining the U.S. This tends to support the view
that it is capitalism that is the true organizational principle of society and democracy is
incidental. Should China continue to out-produce the U.S and pull more and more of its
own citizens out of poverty, as the U.S itself did vis-a-vis the Soviets, are we not forced
to conclude that democracy has been ousted as the superior form of government?
Robbed of the economic high ground, it is tempting to respond by trying to seize the
moral high ground. There may be something here. China does have a large amount of
6

7. political prisoners (Friedman, p.260). Chinese officials respond to this by pointing out
that the U.S. does not have a very good human rights record (Wong, Lecture, Oct.31).
Eric Friedman cites Mauzy and Barter, whose studies in Malaysia indicate that "middle
class consumers privilege stability" (Freidman, p.258). There is no reason to expect the
feelings of the Chinese middle class to be any different. As far as the lower classes are
concerned, Freidman himself points out that "democracy is not a top demand of the worst
off in the system" (Freidman, p.261). In fact, they demand "a strong, centralized state
that will stop privileging the corruptly rich and instead redistribute wealth" (Friedman,
p.261). The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has in fact, made it official policy to
narrow income inequality in China (Wong, Lecture, Oct.31). The claims of the CCP, that
democratization would de-stabilize China (Freidman, p.259), are also not implausible
given the size of China's population and the still very large numbers of poor people.
According to Professor Wong, Chinese officials also consider democracy unnecessary,
given that everyone agrees on the desired end of successful government, namely
increasing economic prosperity, widely distributed (Wong, Lecture, Oct.31).
The continuing validity of Winston Churchill's statement is therefore, not entirely clear.
Democracy on a national or international scale renders the supposedly free individual
easy prey for a capitalist system that in a sense dictates his actions anyway. The
collective action problem, defined by Olson, illustrates how in economies of this scale the
rational individual will live off the system without really contributing to it (Olson, p.21).
While being free to obey the dictates of the market may be better than living under an
irrational and genocidal dictatorship or an autocratic state that fails to provide its citizens
7

8. with a modern standard of living, it cannot immediately be said to trump the example
provided by modern China. China's "benevolent dictatorship" (Wong, Lecture, Oct.31)
appears to be able to martial capitalism towards the needs of the state and its citizens,
rather than leaving both to the whims of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’.
8